ature of professional costume. Ladies of rank dyed
their hair, and wore false tresses in Elizabethan England; but their
example was not extensively followed by the men of their time--although
the courtiers of the period sometimes donned 'periwinkes,' to the
extreme disgust of the multitude, and the less stormy disapprobation of
the polite. The frequency with which bands are mentioned in Elizabethan
literature, affords conclusive evidence that they were much worn toward
the close of the sixteenth century; and it is also matter of certainty
that they were known in England at a still earlier period. Henry VIII.
had "4 shirte bands of silver with ruffes to the same, whereof one was
perled with golde;" and in 1638 Peacham observed, "King Henry VIII. was
the first that ever wore a band about his neck, and that very plain,
without lace, and about an inch or two in depth. We may see how the case
is altered, he is not a gentleman, or in the fashion, whose band of
Italian cutwork standeth him not at the least in three or four pounds;
yea, a sempster in Holborn told me there are of threescore pound price
apiece." That the fops of Charles I.'s reign were spending money on a
fashion originally set by King Henry the Bluff, was the opinion also of
Taylor the Water Poet, who in 1630 wrote--

"Now up alofte I mount unto the ruffe,
Which into foolish mortals pride doth puffe;
Yet ruffes' antiquity is here but small--
Within this eighty years not one at all;
For the Eighth Henry (so I understand)
Was the first king that ever wore a _band_;
And but a _falling-band_, plaine with a hem;
All other people knew no use of them.
Yet imitation in small time began
To grow, that it the kingdom overran;
The little falling-bands encreased to ruffes,
Ruffes (growing great) were waited on by cuffes,
And though our frailties should awake our care,
We make our ruffes as careless as we are."

In regarding the falling-band as the germ of the ruff, the Water-Poet
differs from those writers who, with greater appearance of reason,
maintain that the ruff was the parent of the band. Into this question
concerning origin of species, there is no occasion to enter on the
present occasion. It is enough to state that in the earlier part of the
seventeenth century bands or collars--bands stiffened and standing at
the backward part, and bands falling upon the shoulder and breast--were
articles of costume upon which men of e